New approach diagnosing Apnea

My question is: Is that possible to diagnose apnea basically from the SaO2- SpO2 values only ? By this, we will figure out if there are reasonable results and make people more comfortable to get apnea treatment from their houses, especially whom are disabled.

I use the polysomnography .edf raw values, filter Time-SaO2 with EDF browser and import to MS SQL.

In MS SQL I run a query code and calculate the oxygen desaturation during all time which is appoximately 8,5 hours for each, around 30.000 secs.

I focus on the AHI and RDI basically. As I know shortly, RDI = AHI + Arousals .

The RDI* variables in SHHS are not necessarily "AHI + arousals". They are more like AHI variables, but all events (apneas and hypopneas) are required to be associated with a desaturation (of 4%, for instance, in RDI4P).

I assume there are people trying to "diagnose" sleep apnea using only an oximetry channel. Naturally, the ODI closely aligns with AHI in many cases.

Do you have any specific data questions? Or inconsistent data findings? I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking at in your image.

Note that if you derived "new" oxygen desaturations from the raw signal then you would want to be sure your methodology matched with whatever was used by the original sleep scoring software. Otherwise your new metrics would not be comparable.

Hi Mike,
Following up on this discussion, how do we know what AASM guidelines were used for scoring on the different databases?
Also, in addition to the AHI/RDI entries, is there a ''final diagnosis'' from the MD that is provided? (and which is based on both indexes and symptoms as per the ICSD-3)?

There isn't a "final diagnosis" per se since the sleep studies for most datasets were conducted for research purposes, so there wasn't an MD interpretation at the end. Users could try computing their own diagnosis variable from the indexes of interest and questionnaire data.

Thanks Mike. That's helpful. Although as I look at the SHHS information it does not look for any of the regular AASM rules for the hypopnea events scoring (AASM mentions desaturations of 3 or 4 % depending on the guideline year, whereas on the SHHS Manual they mention 2% desaturations).